Just One Big Mistake

Republished, without permission, from the subconscious of Salon.com

It really tears out my heart to see another promising Black child make one mistake that ruins his life.

Daron Dylan Wint was a 34-year-old kid, likely working on getting his Ph.D in Cancer Curing before he made a fatal error earlier this month that jeopardized his whole future.

That error, the authorities claim, was to rob, torture for hours, and set on fire a wealthy White family and their housekeeper in a so-called “sadistic” home invasion.

But before you begin to cast your stones at Mr. Wint, why don’t you look at yourself first. We all do stupid things when we’re kids, like burning a helpless family alive for money. Wint, being a 34-year-old child, probably wasn’t thinking right when he did this, just like you weren’t thinking right when you snuck out of your parents’ house to go to that sketchy party your folks told you not to go.

And unlike you, Wint has never had the privilege of having white, er, privilege. Stuck as an alienated, oppressed Black youth for his whole life, this young man never had the chance to succeed in this white supremacist state, even though it was probable that he was well on his way to discovering interdimensional space travel before he knocked on the Savopoulos family door.

Speaking of white privilege, Wint’s supposed victims had a lot of it. With their fancy house, nice cars, beaming smiles, and the father’s successful business, they had more than enough to spare for intrepid entrepreneurs like their home invader. Plus, knowing how Black bodies are brutalized on a daily basis, the least the Savopoulos could’ve done was experience it a bit for themselves.

Besides, how do we know Wint did this crime anyway? His DNA was found on pizza crust at the house? How do we know White people didn’t plant it there in order to ruin the life of another Black youth?

Just look at how justice was given to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. “Evidence” seems to have an anti-Black bias, so why do we rely on it?

And before you make bigoted assumptions, you need to listen to what Wint’s lawyer has to say about him.

“My impression of him — I remember him rather well — is that he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“He’s a very nice person.”

There’s also the fact there have been virtually no instances of Blacks committing such horrific crimes against Whites. I’ve seen Mississippi Burning and A Time To Kill–I know only Whites would do such awful things. Why would Blacks do such things when they are portrayed as such gentle, non-violent people in the movies? And I know Hollywood is more accurate in depicting crime than “actual” crime statistics that are really just a collection of racist, ignorant trash.

Daron Dylan Wint never had a chance living in a White supremacist society that guarantees Blacks admission into the most prestigious schools, creates academic disciplines for the sole purpose of empowering Blacks, hands them lucrative government jobs that they can never be fired from, worships their supposed musical and athletic superiority, and designs a welfare state with Black needs in mind.

No wonder he lashed out—if he in fact did so—at the white privilege of the Savopoulos family when he was so familiar with injustice.

Hopefully, there can be a happy ending to this story and we can all come to an understanding that Wint just made an honest mistake. In the end, he’s not a monster like those frat boys who said “nigger” on a party bus or Jim Bob Duggar for having too many White kids. He’s just a good boy who did one little thing wrong.

Lucky for him, there’s a precedent that could ensure this bright teen is not unjustly punished for his bad decision. Back in April, a heroic Black judge in Kentucky made the right decision when he gave no prison time to a well-meaning 27-year-old youth who, like Wint, made one wrong mistake and invaded the home of a White family. The judge, Olu Stevens, made his decision when he discovered something shocking about the apparent victims: they were a bunch of vicious racists!

You won’t believe the hateful thoughts the family’s 3-year-old daughter had towards Blacks after a Black man terrorized her and her parents. “She is in constant fear of black men. When we are running errands, if we come across a black male, she holds me tight and begs me to leave. If (she) is playing in a room and I walk into another, she freaks out. It has affected her friendships at school and our relationship with African American friends,” bigot-in-chief Jordan Gray said in his victim statement.

HOW DARE SHE! Time for her parents and her to sit down and watch 12 Years a Slave and The Help on repeat until they unlearn their hate and apologize to their well-meaning intruder.

This rightfully set off Judge Stevens and he let the court room know just how offended he was by that bigoted statement. After realizing the 27-year-old boy had robbed a family of monsters, he sentenced him to probation instead of prison time.

This heartwarming development could save Wint from an unnecessary and cruel sentence. If he can prove that Mr. Savopoulos had said nigger at any point in his life or that the Savopoulos’ 10-year-old son began to think less of Black people after a Black man tortured his parents and doused him with gasoline, we could have the break we need to save this young child.

Furthermore, we would need to hold our noses at his noxious libertarianism and encourage Rand Paul to successfully push through his legislation that would eliminate mandatory sentencing and allow entrepreneurial heroin dealers, gang-bangers, and rapists a chance to re-enter society. And while we’re supporting the otherwise idiotic Senator from Kentucky, we can hop on board his proposal to give free job training to deserving non-whites, and Wint might have the perfect opportunity to turn his life around.

Just imagine this: the wise judge understands Wint is not fully at fault due to him living under oppression and finds out about the bigotry of his supposed victims. He then sentences him to two years in a joint detention/job training facility where he learns coding for free from professors at MIT. After completing his time, the reformed home invader gets a job at Google and becomes one of the company’s star programmers! He then serves as the poster child for the wonderful society we can create once we offer misunderstood torture-murderers second chances and can give speeches to CPAC on the way the Republican Party can survive in a majority-minority future.

This could all be possible once we realize that what this nice person did over the course of two days to the Savopoulos family wasn’t a crime—it was just a mistake.